We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  Misha sweeps an arm out, as if clearing a great, invisible, cluttered table. “I’m thirty-three. I could live to be one hundred. That means I’ve lived one third of my life.”

  “Solid math.” I turn and look for Elijah, but he isn’t there; just some guy eating a slice of green quiche off his left knee.

  “One third and think about it—how much of the first ten years do you remember? This is the part of our lives we’ll remember all of. All of it.”

  “What a horrifying thought.” Elijah?

  “I mean, when you really think about it”—two sets of arms and legs in the corner unfurl from each other—“your twenties are just, like, preparation, getting ready. I mean”—most people are listening to him now, or too drunk to resist—“I mean, who here owns anything? Not a car. That doesn’t count.” I don’t own a car. “Who has a kid? We are a fucked generation. None of us will ever own anything.”

  True—the recession set in the year I finished undergrad, and the economy won’t change anything soon. The damage has been done. We’ll live in tents like our ancestors. I pour water into my whisky.

  “Misha…” Kendra’s voice drifts up nervously.

  “I’m not saying he was right.”

  “Misha, thanks. Game’s over.” Kendra scans the room nervously—she doesn’t want this mess to dishonour his memory.

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying, I’m saying life is long because there’s always more time. A lot more.”

  A few people applaud as Misha staggers a bit, raises both his arms.

  “It’s your Jesus year,” Kendra says.

  “What?”

  “Thirty-three. Your Jesus year.”

  Misha laughs. “I’m Jewish.”

  “So was Jesus,” I mumble.

  “Isn’t the whole point of Jesus that every year is your Jesus year?” A girl in the corner stares at us, her eyes conjoined in angry focus. No matter where you are and what you’re doing, someone will be mad if you bring up Jesus.

  “I don’t know.”

  Misha points at Kendra. “What happens in your Jesus year?”

  “Realization.”

  Misha points at me. “My child,” he says. “Life is short.”

  Elijah was a year older than me. He was twenty-one the first time he got really sick. I visited him in the hospital. I remember very little of that visit. The white noise from the hidden machinery in neighbouring rooms irradiated the ventricles of the afternoons I spent there. His father hunched in the area for families, seafoam-green upholstered benches jammed together, and a rubber plant with a Santa hat on one branch. Elijah mumbled to me about the ocean, how it was full of people. He wanted me to understand that water is made of people, and that he had swum with them. That is why there is so much water, because that’s where all the people go. Past and future people, he told me. We’re all in there. I promised him that I understood, so that he would let me leave. His father only came that first time. They’d been back in touch for just a few years at that point.

  “Jesus year—is that like the fundamentalist version of Saturn’s return?” Misha says.

  “It’s different,” Kendra says. I always forget she was raised Catholic. Somewhere in her is a streak of do-the-right-thing conservatism, the yellow stripe down the middle of the highway that bisects her hometown.

  Someone I don’t recognize pipes up helpfully: “I read a thing on Facebook recently that horoscopes are really popular with millennials because we have nothing stable to live for anymore.”

  “That’s a reason to live, Soma,” Misha says to me. “Your Jesus year.”

  Kendra steps forward, surprises me with her burst of anger. She’s getting tired, wants everyone out of her place. “Soma,” she says, “has many reasons to live.”

  Short

  A girl I recognize, sort of, from university—we had a couple classes together probably, or maybe I just knew her from parties—turns to me at some point in the kitchen and says, “The skyline is ruined for me now.”

  “What?” I say.

  “The view of the bridge. It’s ruined now. I mean, I know that’s selfish, but it’s true. It was my favourite view in the city. That bridge is on every Vancouver postcard.”

  Long

  Outside, in the faint rain, a small cluster of bodies in the sweet smoke, a bit rancid, a bit potpourri. “Ah, cloves,” someone says, and laughter is passed from hand to hand, pressed between wet burning fingers. Water seeps into the cracks in my boots again. Illuminated eyes float like bathyspheres. My mind plummets into a familiar well. The smoke does its old familiar work on me.

  “—and when his dad stood up and said that stuff about compassion—fucking hypocrite—”

  “—yeah—like, everyone knows, man—”

  “—only came here once or twice—not that far—prairies—”

  “—the whole time—so sick—Elijah—”

  “—sorry your kid’s a faggot—and you—”

  “—that whole thing—”

  “—Elijah would have hated—”

  My skull aches, stretches, sections of bone drift and reassemble. Smoke enters and leaves, enters and leaves.

  “—good to get some air—”

  “—this is good stuff—”

  “—things were chill until Kendra brought it down—”

  “—that fucking game—”

  Laughter.

  “—fucking heavy—”

  I watch a cloud of smoke take the form of a white fish and soar across the empty circle and into the night. Elijah was right about a lot of things.

  “—fuck this—”

  “—sweet guy—”

  “—sweetheart—”

  “—fucking waste—”

  “—not a mean bone in—”

  Inside, a restrained roar. The party is kicking into its third life. People who went home or out to eat or to spend time alone after the church service have circled back. Kendra told me she invited some guys from Elijah’s hometown over for lemonade and coffee cake at the reception. “You invited them?” I’d asked her, disbelieving. Now, four tall guys in black suit jackets, white shirts, like an amateur Beatles cover band, are coming down the path. Hair combed to the side, eyes sober. Leering at them, I feel like a hyena caught in headlights on the side of the road.

  “Is this the thing for Elijah?” one of them asks, a guy with a hawkish nose, hands pushed deep into his pockets. Once, I asked Elijah about his friends from where he grew up. He blew smoke smoothly: Who cares? Robots.

  A broken circle of coughs. “Yeah.”

  They go inside. We drift in a lung of smoke. Rain shatters around the outside of my skull. Phantom touch of judgment says, Don’t smoke more. It’s a heavy wheel turning, slumping forward, completing a final turn into stillness, a silence that presses all the way down, into the floor of my mind. More, more, more. Elijah lying next to me on his bed, a cloud of our shared smoke drifting around us. Staring at the ceiling, he tells me about the Greyhound station in the middle of nowhere where he first cruised for men. The blue light in the tiny bathroom to make it harder for people to shoot up. He left young, but not young enough. His silence when I answer, “I slept outside when I was young too.” When he says nothing, I turn my head and check to see if he’s fallen asleep. His eyes are closed and smoke passes in and out of his mouth. His eyelids flutter. “Tell me the story,” he says. Instead I tell him about how when I was in elementary school I got obsessed with a lamp that was supposed to treat seasonal depression, how I stole another girl’s dad’s credit card, a girl I had a crush on but didn’t know what that was yet, a girl so mean-eyed and aloof I loved her for it, and I thought the lamp would cure my mother’s severe chronic mental illness—here Elijah squeezes his eyelids shut, his mouth tenses into a rippling seam of restrained laughter—and then the girl and her friends jum
ped me in the hallway, and then when the lamp arrived it was a piece of shit, a blue glass light bulb in a white blobby stand like a knock-off Lego starship, and I knew it was a fake, I knew it like I knew the second I slipped that credit card out of that girl’s back pocket that I was gay, but I used the lamp anyway, I coveted it, I prayed over it. I was too ashamed to show it to my father or even to Josiah, I kept that lamp to myself and I would turn it on and sit in front of it for hours at night, bathing in its cold, sugary radiance.

  “How poignant,” Elijah says, and we lie on our backs and laugh, push smoke from our empty pipes and watch it invent shapes against the ceiling and window, we laugh at all the creatures we have been and the weird joy of telling it to each other.

  Short

  I sit in Jim’s kitchen and watch him heat the small iron pan he reserves for omelettes, melt butter, whisk eggs.

  I can’t stop thinking about the moment I leaped up and shouted that the party was an exorcism, I tell him.

  Jim swivels and points his whisk at me. “Stop obsessing.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it,” I groan.

  It’s been over a week since the party. I’ve ignored Kendra’s messages. For a couple days after the party, people posted on the event page. More photos; sentimental shards of text. A meaningless social networking emotive mosaic. I’ve watched Kendra comment “Thank you!” on each one. She’s made herself the page’s only administrator, the moderator of memories of Elijah.

  Jim asks me what I’m thinking about. I watch his face as I recite the story Elijah told me about when he ran away. Jim listens, his face relaxed, and then shakes his head. “Every queer gets thrown out sometime,” he says.

  Short

  Kendra’s living room is silent when I go back in. The guys in suits are at the centre, the tallest one muttering, hands pressed together. Kendra leans against the fridge, cheeks unnaturally white.

  Misha lies on the couch, eyeing the smouldering end of his cigarette. “E.T., call home,” he says, holding his finger a hair’s breadth from the orange tip.

  I scan the room. Most people are deep in prayer.

  There was the brief service at the church Elijah had gone to on and off for the last couple years, but before that there had been another ceremony, back in Elijah’s hometown, to which we, his second family, weren’t invited. I wonder what they did with his soul, and if he can tell. Elijah’s oldest sister had called me to stiffly relay her condolences; she would not be travelling. Is it the suicide or the gayness, I’d wanted to ask. This is why Elijah had no filters. They had been burned away. His leaving; his missing cells.

  In the hospital, the third or fourth time, the psychiatrist sits across from me in the shoebox-sized room, her knees nearly touching mine, apologizes for the lack of space, the lack of time, writes continuously on her clipboard without looking up while I speak, as if transcribing the lyrics of a song as it plays, mutters occasional words to match mine—“filters,” “self-help,” “university.” Elijah’s presentation, she tells me, supports... And my brain downshifts into a mode between delirious bemusement and dark fatigue. “Presentation,” I repeat. His presentation about what? My mind fumbles the handfuls of details to summarize Elijah, make her understand.

  His psychosis, she tells me, has a strong storytelling element. She asks how I know Elijah, how did I come to be the one who brings him in when he’s sick. I gaze at her listlessly. “He calls me,” I say. “We met at school.” The psychiatrist watches me, and puts the cap back on her pen.

  “Where’s his family?” she says.

  “Have you checked the ocean?” I say, trying to be Elijah.

  Short

  It starts with self-help books. I drop by his place on a Tuesday. He’s renting the back bedroom in an apartment with three other guys. We smoke weed on his windowsill. He points at each of the twenty-five or thirty books assembled in an arching rigid pattern on his bed, like the bones of a church window. Typical Elijah, gushing eagerly, ferociously, about his latest self-improvement project. Before this, there’s been jogging, weightlifting, learning German on an app. He jumps forward onto the bed and tosses one of the books back to me, The Highly Sensitive Person. The cover has swoopy letters like a cookbook from the seventies. He’s been going about things all wrong, he tells me. He needs to get to the root causes. All this time he’s just been trying to fix the things he does, the things on the surface. “Bullshit!” he tells me triumphantly. So sure of himself, this time. I nod and nod. My head bobs numbly, an empty can on a riptide. When he had told me the story about running away after the conversion ceremony and I had told him the story about the lamp and the rest of the stories about my mother, everything, everything, something had happened, we had become family. “Now that I know,” he says to me, sweeping an arm over the books, “I can do something about it,” and then he repeats, “Now that I know, now that I know, now that I know.” How intensely he wants me to know what he knows. He hands me one book, and another, and another, always sliding the books on the bed around, never leaves a gap. He’s always read so much—recycled courses through a long series of majors—philosophy, history, political science, communication studies, then the attenuated fade into interdisciplinary studies, to try to cobble all those credits into something. Something to show for himself. When I graduated with a boilerplate literature degree, I didn’t think about why Elijah wasn’t graduating, even though he was older than me—he was already separate from the rest of us. Then we quickly became the same in how frequently we changed jobs, our frenetic aimlessness. The first few kitchens I worked in, I only lasted a few months. I only cared about the paycheque, to make rent, have my small space away from my brother and father for the first time. Elijah hopped workplaces at a similar pace, but the reasons were always vague—a co-worker he suspected of stealing his phone; a manager who was reading his email. It was just the way he was. Sensitive, always having a hard time, taking everything to heart. “You can see my organs under the right light,” he joked once. During one of his last jobs, at a shoe store, he’d CC’d me on a long email to a boss and co-workers. I skimmed the email, dull panic stirring in me, and deleted it when I got to the long, numbered list of grievances. One of the final items was a rambling critique of the manager’s dog, in which Elijah catalogued the resemblances between the manager and his dog. THE DOG WHO CHOOSES THE HUMAN, Elijah wrote, REVEALS THE MARROW OF CHARACTER. DOGS SEE IN BLACK AND WHITE. At least there wasn’t a diagram.

  The books are helping, he tells me.

  When he looks into my eyes, I feel abruptly shy, old fear runs aground on the floor of my stomach.

  “This could help you too, Soma,” he says. “We’re the same, you know we are.”

  Now, since he flew from the bridge into the black dream at the edge of the city, my secrets are in the Pacific, dispersing like a suitcase of stars pushed overboard.

  Short

  Kendra sits between two of the guys from Elijah’s home.

  “What was Elijah like when he was young?” she asks.

  I’ve never tried to picture Elijah as a kid and now when I try for the first time, I can’t. Only this age. Only flat on his back, arms outstretched, smiling, swirling.

  “Quiet.”

  “Did you know?”

  “No.”

  What was there to know? Who can point to a day, a year, and say, this is when he was lost to us?

  I sit and press my spine against the couch’s swollen lip. The straggling crew left over. Misha, asleep against the far wall, bundled up in a windbreaker that’ll soak through in a city block in this weather. I wonder for how long he and Elijah were lovers before Elijah faded away, like he did with all of them.

  Kendra says, “When did you hear from him last?”

  The guy hesitates. His friend sitting across from Kendra says, “There was a package.”

  In the corner, Misha lifts his head. “What was in it?�
�

  “Books.”

  “Books?”

  “Just lots of”—he looks embarrassed, as if by Elijah’s tacky taste—“lots of self-help books.”

  My laugh, an ugly fish slopping from my mouth. Twelve Steps To Happiness; The Decluttered Mind; Change Your Life Today. The guy looks at me questioningly, and I am surprised by tears that suddenly fill his eyes, burst from underneath his rings of dark blue, and fall over his cheeks. Elijah was away for years, but maybe that’s nothing if you’re from the same tiny place. I look back at him and wonder again why none of Elijah’s siblings are here. I think, I could give you some answers, some relief. That Elijah began collecting those books after he really started to lose it. That he read those books scrupulously and highlighted passages and emailed me the catalogues of his minor epiphanies, which often metastasized into groaning organs of Gmail chains. Sometimes I woke to thirty, forty new emails from Elijah. He probably sent that box of books to you and forgot afterwards. It could all mean nothing, so don’t look too closely. I don’t say this. I give Elijah the final word. He mailed that town a disco ball in a garbage can—thanks for nothing, I raise you everything.

  Long

  When he starts to run, he can’t stop. He planned it as an overnight thing, a break. I needed a break, he tells me. The distances around his town can’t be measured by the eye. Shades, green and brown, stretching over rivers and skyline. He has never travelled over long distances without a truck, a long line of cars full of people like him. After a few hours, his feet ache. One of his toes feels like it’s broken. He stops, takes off his socks and shoes, and keeps going. They all wear the same cheap shoes, all the kids. Black and square-ish. Fucking hideous, he tells me. His whole life, he’s felt like he’s in drag, in that white and black and grey world. When he starts to remember, in university, those are the colours that his weeks running arrive in. Black trees, grey fields, water flowing white. The smoke drifts around us as he goes on. He knows they’re searching for him. He sees his face on a TV in a diner, through the window. He rushes in, uses the washroom, rushes out again, and keeps going. He’s fifteen, he can’t do whatever he wants. He’s ready. In a fucked-up way, they prepared him for this. The aloneness, the sheer stamina of continuing on his aching feet, of doubling down on all his pain. He knows to stay away from highways. He follows fences instead. If you want to find your way, he tells me, walk under a power line. The power lines take him down a vast path along the side of a mountain. He jogs and walks slowly, taking his time, because there’s always the chance that when he gets to where he’s going, they’ll find him, send him back. He will wait until he’s eighteen to send a letter, to tell them he’s still here. For now, he’s a boy walking under twin wires guiding him across the sky, summoned forward by their charge, arms channelling signals, a body telegraphed into the future.